Nothing but spinning

I started seeing the posts in blog land for the Tour de Fleece but decided not to commit. That doesn’t mean I’m not involved. I’m a very active spectator. And like most spectators that are admiringly watching all the participants I couldn’t resist doing some spinning too. Here’s what I got.

This is the sheep 2 shoe kit from The Fold that I picked up from MSWF.

It is super wash merino, and is called Rainbow. The roving in the kit is incredibly soft and I absolutely loved spinning it. This had to be the most buttery stuff I have spun so far.
However, I think the results I got should be called Rainbow Gone Wild. I didn’t exactly follow the directions of how to divide the roving and spin it. Ok, I didn’t follow the directions at all. I divided the roving different then what it said and I 2 plied it instead of 3. I two plied it because the yarn came out thicker then what I was wanting. Then there are the colors. Wow, the colors are all over the place. I knitted up a swatch and I could see no pattern at all with the colors.
I’m not sure how I feel about it. I do know that I will not use this to make socks. Well, not at this time. I’m putting it into the stash for now.

I also finished spinning this super wash merino I got from Little Barn at the festival.
It’s funny because both rovings said they were superwash merino but there was a big difference in how they spun. I guess it depends on the sheep, processing, how it’s stored etc. Not to say this wasn’t fun to spin. It was just a different quality then the other roving.
This one is just plain vanilla so to say. It will work great for socks but I might dye it at some time.

I hope everybody is having a great weekend.

Walk with Rohan

Did you know crocs float? Yes that’s my shoe he is retrieving. No matter, it always comes back to me.

It doesn’t matter what intensity she throws it at.


Whether he has to get his face wet,


Or go way out of his way to find it.


He always brings it back.


We have gotten a lot of rain the past couple of days so we took Rohan out for a walk to the place where nobody likes to go when it rains.

Vest

This is a knit a long project I’m doing with my sister who lives in a different state. I have somehow managed to get further along on it then what she is. Actually I know how I’ve managed this, I only have about three projects on the needles at this time instead of the 5 or 6 she has. I also haven’t been getting to go to all the fun vacation places that she has been going to. You know how all that fun vacationing stuff squashes the time you get to spend knitting. Anyway, I was going to wait till I finished it before I posted about it. I am so close to finishing it, but I ran out of yarn. Don’t you just hate when that happens? Not to worry though, more is on its way.

I’ll give more specifics on it when it is done. I had added stitches for the length (which is probably why I ran out of yarn). I told my sister I would post pictures so she could see how the extra stitches look. That way she can decide if she might want to add more stitches. I had added enough stitches to give it an extra inch in the front and an inch in the back. I really think it would be long enough without adding more stitches. I just don't like things to be to short in that area. Cropped tops are not my thing. I don't have much experience in blocking but I'm guessing that blocking it might add length to it to but I'm not sure. I am hoping that blocking it will take some of that curl out of the front edge.


This picture isn't that great at showing the length. It is still on the needles which makes it pull up on the right side of this picture but I liked the picture. It shows the texture nicely :).

Dax is modeling this. She is a little shorter than me but so is my sister ;).

Have a great day!

Eye Candy Friday

I have yet to participate in the eye candy Friday. So, here is my first attempt at it.

These are moon jellies (moon jellyfish) .
They are all over the beach right now. By the time they wash up on the beach they are harmless.
Actually they are harmless even before they wash up on the beach, they usually only bother people with sensitive skin. Tyde is one of them, he says they feel like little ants bitting. It must not be too bad because it doesn’t get him out of the water, not like the man o’wars. Now those things hurt. I’ve also heard that turtles like to eat them. Whenever I see the moonjellies I think, "oh look turtle jello."


I took these pictures yesterday right before the sun went down. That’s why they look so shadowy and dark.

I hope everybody has a great weekend.

Fourth of July weekend

Since it’s almost been a week since, here is what we did over the 4th of July weekend.

First, thank you for the comments on the Ugly Sweater. I’m so glad that it isn’t ugly looking to you guys. After knitting on it for awhile I ended up frogging it. The Bernat cotton yarn was not living up to my expectations. I debated for a long time on what to do. I have two options in my stash, there is South West Trading Company 100% Bamboo, or a yarn I totally forgot I had, Tahki cotton classic. I finally decided on the Tahki Cotton Classic. If it doesn’t work out I’ll try the bamboo.

Fireworks, even though the city canceled the big fireworks show on the beach, very disappointing, we still got to see some nice fireworks in the neighborhood. I think because of the cancellation more people bought their own this year. I was surprised to see so many. Rohan is ok with fireworks. He gets a bit excited running around the yard and barking at first but then he settles down and sits by my feet. All except the fountains Rudy and the kids bought. I had to put him inside. He was practically pulling me across the yard trying to get to them.

Ikea, we heard the advertisements for the big Ikea sale. We still need some storage furniture so the advertising worked on us. It got us to make the drive to Orlando to check it out. Of course all the items on our list were not on sale. We did get some dressers and night stands. Rudy walks around the store saying things like “I can make that.” So, I took this picture because I want Rudy to make what’s in the back ground for Tyde’s room. That’s Rudy with the list. I have also put a request in for a desk to go in the craft room. Right now I use the dinning room table to sew on. It’s a pain to take the sewing machine out and put it back up. Actually, I just take it out and leave it there. We usually eat outside on the patio.

Here is what the dining room table looks like right now.A mess isn’t it? As you can tell I did clear the sewing machine off. Only because I wanted to put the drum carder on it ;). My pathetic looking little plant is surrounded by wool.

The Ugly Sweater

It’s not actually ugly, it just got nicknamed that over time. Back in March of 07 my sister and I wanted to knit the same sweater pattern and we choose this,Surplice Lace Top.

My sister kept showing it to friends and family members and didn’t get the excited response that she felt it deserved. The responses were something like, "it’s ok," or "are you sure you want to knit that." So she dubbed it the ugly sweater. I of course liked it, so we started looking for yarn to knit it. The yarn suggested for it was not in our budget so we started looking for something that was a little less pricey. We ended up not finding anything. I put the pattern back on the shelf for another day.

I saw on Mcknitter's blog that a somewhat local craft store was going out of business. It’s a little bit of a drive for me to get there, but not bad. So I made a note to make sure to go by the going out of business sale later that week. When we got there everything was at least 40% off. It was crowded. Dax went to the painting section and I went straight to the knitting section and it had already been hit hard. I did see some bernat organic cotton and thought maybe this would work for the ugly sweater. The yarn suggested for the original pattern was also 100% cotton. I had to make a decision, the yarn was quickly disapperaing so I bought it. I know this yarn is usually used for rags. This could be one of my worst ideas in knitting, maybe my surplice lace top is destined to really be the ugly sweater. Throwing all caution to the wind, I casted on.If this doesn’t work out I’m going to have a lot of rag yarn in my stash.

As for the craft store sale I also found some jacquard dyes and Dax got some paint/paint brushes. So it was worth the drive, not to mention we ate lunch at Panera Bread.

I hope everybody has a great weekend.

Random Rainbow

I’m not sure what to think of this yarn I made.



I guess I should start from the beginning. I got this sheep 2 shoe kit from The Fold at MSWF. The roving in the kit is incredibly soft and I absolutely loved spinning it. I didn’t exactly follow the directions of how to divide the roving and spin it.



Ok, I didn’t follow the directions at all. I divided the roving different then what it said and I 2 plied it instead of 3. That’s because I spun the singles thicker then what I should have imo for socks.



I have been playing around with this yarn. First, I knitted up a swatch. The swatch was not bad. The colors gradually changed from one color to the next but this was done with a cast on of only 15 stitches. I knew that once I casted on enough stitches to actually make something with, the colors would not gradually change. I decided to cast on for a sock anyway. Oh my, the colors are all over the place. There was a kind of striping from darker shades to lighter but no real pattern to it.

So I then decided to use an entrelac pattern.

This might be acceptable but the yarn is still a bit thick for socks to me. I’ve decided to frog it and set it to one side for awhile.

Shirred Shirt

Awhile back when we went to Disney Dax saw a shirt that she thought was cute. I of course took a picture of the shirt and told her I would try and make something like it. Here is a picture of the shirt she liked.
I wasn’t sure how the top of the shirt was gathered and then I saw a tutorial at kuky ideas. It’s called shirring. I keep thinking of Lord of the Rings every time I say that word. Anyway you use elastic thread in the bobbin of the sewing machine and use normal thread in the top. From the tutorial it sounds like it is suppose to draw the fabric up automatically but I couldn’t get it to do this. I had to pull the elastic thread, like for gathering. Also my sewing machine was not too pleased with having elastic thread in the bobbin. Occasionally the thread would get stuck in the bobbin case and brake the top thread. I would have to clear the bobbin area of the thread and start again. It didn’t do this to me a lot but enough for it to be annoying. I’m not sure if it was something I was doing wrong or if my sewing machine just didn’t like this technique. I have a babylock esante ese.

I used McCall’s pattern 5050. The modifications I did were the shirring, I also didn’t gather up the sleeves and I put the bottom elastic casing in a little lower then on the pattern. I did originally put the casing where the pattern suggested but it gave the top too much of a maternity look. So I dropped the casing below the seam line where the purple fabric meets the blue. Actually it’s right on top of the seam. This helped gather the purple fabric making it drape better. I also cut about 3 inches off the length.

.
If I did this pattern, with this method again I would try and use a lighter weight fabric. I also wouldn’t pull in the elastic around the neck line as much as I did. All in all, I think she likes it.

We went to Targets yesterday to get the spiderwick movie on DVD. I noticed when I was there they had the top that we saw on the person at Disney. It was on sale for around $7.00, hmmm.

Brown BFL

Thank you so much for all the nice comments on the bayerische socks. I really do appreciate them.

I finally finished spinning and plying the brown BFL that I got from Misty Mountain Farm.

I really enjoyed spinning this. It just took me a long time because there was a 1lb of it.

I Navajo plied it and managed to get 642 yards. At first I was a bit disappointed in the yardage. I thought I would have gotten much more out of this roving, but then I started knitting with it. First I used size 6 needles, then 7, 8, 9, 10 ½, it wasn’t till I got up to the sie 10 ½ needle that I actually started liking how the stitches looked. I went ahead and knitted a little more with a size 11 needle. It looked so much better with the larger needles and it felt so much softer.

So after calculating the stitch per inch this yarn could go for a bulky yarn. I got about 3 ½ stitches per inch with it, yeah. Now I’ll probably go to ravelry and spend a good bit of time looking for patterns that might work with this yarn.

Bayerische

Yeah, they are done and I really like them!
I present to you my bayerisches.


Specs
Pattern: Bayerische, This pattern isn't as bad as it looks. Once you get past a few rows it becomes much easier to follow. The pattern requires you to k1tb before each chart but it is not on the chart, so I had to write it on my chart to remind me to k1tb. I loved this pattern so much that I can see doing them again as a gift.

Yarn: Regia Silk. I did love knitting with this yarn but I also noticed that it has fuzzed up a little bit so I am concerned that over time it might turn into a fuzz ball. We’ll see.

Needle Size: US Size 1 (2.25mm). The pattern called for size 0 needles but I decided to use a size up. I’ve done size 0 needles on socks before and have found them to be to snug. If I had to choose I would rather my socks to be lose then tight. But I didn't need to worry, the size 1 needles worked out well for me.

Today was the last day of work for me. Summer vacation has officially started!

Ten on Tuesday

I saw this “Ten on Tuesday” on somebody’s blog and thougt I would give it a try. I’ll probably get bored of it after awhile but for now it was kind of fun to make my ten list. And since it feels funny to do a post wihtout a picture, I included a few pictures taken from the butterfly exhibit at Epcot's flower festival. You can click on pictures to biggify.

This week is 10 Favorite Time Wasters.

1. Blog Reading- I spend a lot of time reading blogs. I do love reading blogs but I really lose concept of time when I’m clicking around through them. Sadly only a very small percentage of them do I actually leave comments on but yes I spend a lot of time lurking in blog land.

2. Blog Posting- I also spend a good bit of time making posts for my own blog. It’s funny because I don’t post most of them. My issue is that I know that a lot of my family who are spread out all over the place read my blog for family updates but then I feel uncomfortable sometimes posting too much information especially about Tyde and Dax so they never make it on the blog.



3. Ravelry- What can I say, if you decide to just log in to ravelry to check that one thing, don’t be surprised if an hour later you find out you’ve been side tracked and still haven’t checked that one thing you were originally going to check on.

4. Online Yarn shops- I will visit online yarn shops and play around with the numbers of, if I used this yarn for this project how much would it cost me, then I will go to another yarn and do the same thing. After spending a lot of my time trying to figure out which yarn would be the best deal I end up getting nothing because I realize that I already have a good bit of yarn and I shouldn’t be buying more. Please tell me I'm not the only person who does this.

5. TV -I’m really not much of a TV watcher. I don’t have regular shows that I watch each week but I do get sucked into shows all the time.

6. Baths

7. Book Stores- I love going to a book store but don’t usually do it if I have other things I need to get done. There is no way I can just run in and out of a book store.

8. Library- It’s funny because I work in a library, you would think I wouldn’t want to spend free time in a library but I do. It’s very similar to the book store affect.


9. Going through the yarn stash- I like to look at my yarn stash but it’s best done when I have time to really enjoy it. I usually do it whenever I'm close to finishing a project.

10. Magazines- Another part of my book issue. I love looking through magazines. Even if they aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know, I will still spend the time to read it again.

Nifty Thing

Sorry I had to repost this one. I was playing with the font size and it got way out of hand :).

Have you guys seen one of these nifty things before?

I first saw this little heaven sent item in January when my sister showed me hers. When she first showed it to me I thought, “oh, yet another gadget for knitting.” I have several gadgets already and I really need to cut back on spending money on gadgets so I just gave it a “hmmm.” Well that came back to haunt me.

You see, I almost always have some kind of knitting project with me. You never know when you’re going to be stuck somewhere with nothing to do. And every knitter knows that yucky feeling of having to wait for something or somebody and not have something to knit while you wait, so to avoid that I usually always have some kind of work in progress with me. My choice is a sock and it is usually in my bag with a gazillion other things. And yes occasionally I will lose some stitches because the yarn has slipped off the needles. This can be annoying at times but I’m ok with it. Normally I just slip the stitches back on and off I go again. But then there are projects like the Bayerische socks. Believe me you do not want to lose a stitch, not even a little one on those socks. After losing stitches way to many times I decided that I really need one of those little nifty gadgets. It would save my sanity.

Soooo, when we were at the sheep and wool festival, I reminded my sister several times that if she sees one of those nifty little things that she showed me back in January buy it asap and I would pay her back. We never did see one but she must have got the hint that I really, really wanted one of those nifty little things because I received a wonderful package this week that had not one but two in it. I am so so happy with this little gadget.
Yeah, no more dropped stitches!


The packaging says “DP Wip Tubes”. I guess that is what it’s called. It’s made of a thick cardboard tube that has a slit in it that you slide your project into. It has another tube that is slightly bigger to slip over the original tube. Everything is held in place and I love it.

The grey sock in these pictures is the second sock of bayerische. I’m about to start the heel, finally. The purple one is Dax’s. She is using a pattern called the mystic sea and I’m not sure what the yarn is called except I do know it is superwash.

Stash Enhancement

This is most of the fiber that Dax and I brought home from the MS&W Festival.

Merino Top from Ohio Valley Natural Fibers. I got 3 lbs of this. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I made this purchase. Actually I know what I was thinking, I wanted to make sure I had enough roving to make a sweater. Have any of you heard of a 3 lb sweater before? I'm not sure why I didn't think about what a sweater actually might weigh before I bought all this. Turns out I was told later that it takes about 1 lb of roving to make a sweater. I have enough here for 3 sweaters. Yikes.


Merino from Spinners Hill. I absolutely loved this booth. They had so many nice colors of roving. I had such a hard time deciding on which roving to chose. I bought 1 lb of the blue roving first. I managed to make it back to the booth later on Sunday and most of the rovings were gone, which was just as well, I didn't need to spend more money on rovings. And then I saw the autumn colored roving and bought it to.


Gale's Art Merino 8oz

Pencil Roving: Sorry, Don't Remember This Vendor's Name

Angora/Alpaca/Wool blend 2oz from Wild Meadow Angora


Socks That Rock, and Sheep to Shoe Kit from The Fold.We avoided The Fold on Saturday because they had such a huge line but on Sunday we visited them. They had been picked over but Dax found a skein of STR that she really liked and I went ahead and got the Sheep to Shoe kit.


Cormo Fleece 5.5 lbs This stuff is so nice and clean. Oh my, it has to be the cleanest fleece I have ever gotten, very very nice. I keep taking this fleece out just so I can admire it. Rohan really likes it to.


This is the only yarn I got. The yarn to the left is sock yarn from Misty Mountain Farm. They also had some lovely baby alpaca roving that I almost got but decided that I have more than enough to keep me busy for ahmmm, a while. The yarn on the right is from Brooks Farm. It was on sale. Not to mention it is oh so soft and just lovely yarn.


Tess Silk Yarn and Tess Ribbon Yarn from TessThese are Dax's purchases from the Festival. She had saved money that she got from Christmas and her birthday to spend at the festival and this is what she got. The ribbon yarn is for a cabled tank top and the silk is for a shawl.


Mini Relic Purse from the Renaissance Booth. My reciept says the vendor for this is White Wolf and Phoenix. The green one is Dax's the blue one is mine.


Pencil Roving: Don't Remember the name of this one either.Dax wanted this and it was very reasonable priced. She has been spinning it on my drop spindle. She has been enjoying playing with it, there is no drafting involved.